Framerate is one of the things that will be improved in the new client, but Wurm Online really is a very complex game with thousands of visible dynamic objects (including a fully dynamic terrain), so don't expect quake 3 type framerate.

but what I was trying to get question was the latency times on your server(s). Every ten seconds, the whole game would pause, seeming to freeze, only to start animating 2-5 seconds later. The computer I experienced these issues with was quite a powerful modern day computer with a 512kbps DSL line. Is this a known issue? I suppose it is, and all the glorious changes being made for client ver 2.0 will fix most of the problems.

For the clouds, I started off by implementing a system very similar to that flight simulator cloud cover thing (I even used their textures as placeholders at first, but we're using original textures now), but quickly realized that even though it's reasonably fast, I cannot spend that much gpu power on just the clouds.So placed some more restrictions on it (you can only see the clouds from below, you can't pass them) and reworked a new system. It's basically just a simple array of 16x16 cloud sprites scattered with random offsets and rotations over the skydome, with some tricky hacking with the normals to get them lit up in a way that looks reasonably convincing.

I tried implementing scattering with some other tricks, but lost a lot of dynamic range. I'll look into doing some fragment shader stuff for high end cards.

This system is fast enough, looks real enough, and is very flexible. I'm kinda proud of it.

Actually it was pretty easy to implement Finding the horizon values for any given point is pretty easy, then the resulting angles are stuffed into a texture that covers the whole terrain (at one texel per terrain tile resolution). Then a fragment shader compares this interpolated value with the current sun angle for the total light/shadow intensity.

The snag is that I'm using GLSL which makes the fragment bit dead easy to write. I'm not sure how you'd do it with older hardware.

You probably could use it to do some occulsion culling, but I've simplified the horizon values down to a single axis (basically the arc of the sun over the terrain). This reduces the memory use hugely but probably makes it unsuitable for culling.

Quick pic (which doesn't really show it off well, it looks better when you can see the hill shadows slowly extending as the sun sets):http://www.orangytang.net/Junk/23-09-04.png

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